Arbeit Macht Frei
by sedemihcrA
Summary: As your mother once said, this will only end in tears.
1. Divine Wind

**A/N:** It's a two-hour not-so-oneshot but to hell with it. There will probably be more on this sickeningly soon. Before you hate me, I don't have my computer in Europe or the newest chapter of Revolution would be already up.

* * *

**Arbeit Macht Frei**

**-**

**Divine Wind **

The experiment, as one might call it, as _I_ will now call it henceforth, began in an unseasonably serene January and ended in a not-quite-cold-but-getting-there October, began in the fermentations of a bored mind of an eccentric history professor and ended in tears.

The experiment, rigged and finessed, bribed and bamboozled into being on the coattails of an overzealous history professor, a relic of pre-Impact academia. Waxing poetic as he tended to do through most of the period, drolling off into his own memory of an era forgone, gazing out the window wistfully, old voice stiff and sandpapery, flexing with the air of emotion as he detailed irrelevant events to those of us still listening.

Touji's headphones, little white beads of aural meditation, were firmly in his ears by this point, as they always were, drowning out the mumbling of an old man to the J-Rock sensation of the minute. Hikari, who'd given up all semblance of authority by now, sat at the front of the class with head in hands at her ineffective policing skills. Kensuke deluged himself in stolen wireless and the latest offerings of Stinger missiles, machineguns, ammunition, RPGs, flares, handguns, more ammunition, grenades, trip mines, and the occasional tank, all for offer in the black market arms capital of tribal Pakistan, filling out the order forms with OCD compulsiveness, clicking, double-clicking, barely scraping drool from trembling lips, and my God would you look at the muzzle on her! all to the tune of fortunes he did not have nor could afford. Asuka, over his shoulder, texted with pigeon fingers pecking the chiclet seed of her keypad, constantly in touch with an army of friends she rarely deigned to speak to in person though seemed fond of maintaining communiqué with them for all hours of the day. Other less familiar faces fidgeted, dug in noses when suspecting no eye upon them, snored lightly draped over desks like Dali's clocks, yawned, sighed, scratched unmentionable places, adjusted unmentionables chafing said places, and generally did their best to distract themselves with thoughts of a looming afternoon of which they could enjoy without the stammering hums of one white-haired owlish man, crooning to himself of lost fortunes, and gained territories; terrors and gallantries recalled in half-prophetic visions; he was truly, as they say, "out to sea" and long since lost upon these tiny behaviors which I had the manner and mood of recording for my own attempt at distracting myself.

Touji's track came to its finishing note and the synchronicity struck for the old man whirled upon us, igniting primal fear in my fellow distracted members, scrambling to look attentive to his sudden motion but unable to scrub the headlights from out of the deer's poor eyes.

"That's right!" he announced, holding up one finger and staring slightly up and beyond it, odd parody of some bronzed hero immortalized in a townsqaure somewhere in the south of France. "The trip," he finished softly, his whispery tone taking on a vague sense of wonder.

Asuka paused from her texting, the only of us perhaps not to cringe at the whirling parlor trick of alertness Professor Fushiki had pulled, paused and eyed him with a cynical glare, the kind that hounded lies from fools and frightened me most deeply because I knew no other course but honesty with her.

"Professor?" Hikari asked, making a quick double-check of the classroom's wakefulness, stalling lest she find any still dozing. Someone gave a sharp jab out of my periphery at one of our compatriots still entrenched in the crook of his elbow, bolting him straight up and (miraculously) looking bright-eyed.

"The trip," he repeated with shamanistic forcefulness, nervous grin suddenly alight as he stared back at the president as if she dared ask: "So who is this 'God'-guy, exactly?"

And that's how the experiment began.

* * *

"So what is this Yasukuni thing, exactly?" she said aloud, fighting boredom or pretending to sound as such. 

"You—you don't know?" Kensuke sounded in turns horrified and mystified.

"It's some shrine, jeez…" Even Touji sounded disgusted with her ignorance—but then he tended to be disgusted with much Asuka Langley Souryu had to offer.

"It's not just _some_ shrine!" Kensuke shrieked, even more manic. "It's one of the most sacred sites in all of Japan…"

Asuka barked a laugh and kicked an empty Pocari Sweat onto the checkered white lines of the lane marker on Diaji Street, never breaking her pace. "I didn't take you for the superstitious type, Kensuke. I thought you were too otaku for that shit." Behind them, as the marching line trudged further up the boulevard, the Pocari Sweat gave a satisfying distant crunch under the soft turn of a passing Mercedes' wheels.

"It's not about superstition," he growled, busy making a sweeping pan of the Tokyo skyline and the marching colors of Tokyo-3 High School Class A-2, out of our typical uniforms and showing the best of our closet in our new accessorized freedom, all behind our curious Pied Piper, Fushiki and his tufts of white hair twirling in October breeze and hydrocarbons.

"Yasukuni is a military shrine," he hissed softly. "Dedicated to all those who died, giving their lives in the service of Japan and the Emperor. The souls of every great hero to fall in battle lie there" he intoned, vision briefly yanked away from the Panasonic's viewfinder as he paused in his revelry.

"And villains," Asuka added with a snort.

Hikari leaned a little closer on Touji. "It's creepy, thinking of all those dead people watching you in there." She shivered a little for effect.

He smiled patronizingly and patted her shoulder with his free hand. "Spirits and ghosts are nothing to fear. Asuka's right, it's all just superstitions and ritual, nothing else."

I, busily bobbing my head to the iPod shuffle strapped to my belt buckle, interjected my own thoughts, and having absolutely nothing to say, parroted the chorus from Nazareth's "Hair of the Dog."

"Now you're messin' with a son of a bitch!" I murmured in my best English, trying to equal the stringy high-pitched lead despite having no idea of the meaning.

Asuka's cackling startled me. I glanced at her and she shook her head and waved me off.

"Keep singing Sinatra, you might impress someone some day," she mocked.

I closed my eyes and smiled. The noon's zenith warmed my face against the stubborn chill of downtown and another exalted memory, suddenly knowing I was on vacation, well a vacation of sorts, sparked my good mood easily. "What's wrong with singing?" I asked aloud. "I like to sing. Besides I seem to recall a certain night of karaoke—"

Her python's grip opened my eyes, clutching my forearm with sudden brutality.

"_That_ is not be spoken of. Ever," she snarled in my ear.

Touji shot a glance at me through Hikari's tresses and grinned. "Yes, I do seem to remember a certain incident…"

Asuka, now having mirrored the couple by latching onto my arm, glared into the back of his crew cut as if to drive an invisible spike right through it. Beside me her cheeks were flushing a shade of her hair.

"Yes, a certain Rammstein song I believe it was," Hikari giggled from beside him, toying with one of his ears.

Her shocked mouth opened a fraction at the betrayal, suddenly finding herself without allies. "Et tu brutus?" I imagined her mouthing, then took the opportunity, the moment of weakness, to peck her on the cheek as liked to do whenever her pride was truly wronged. Her stiffened shoulders relaxed a notch and slapped me lightly on the wrist, stifled for a moment as her open mouth closed. She brushed fingertips across one of my favorite shirts, a cactus and a balloon leaning towards each other, a tiny pink Valentine's heart between them and the phrase "Impossible Love" in cursive above the scene. Then the peck was returned as lightly as it was given—Asuka preferred to be remarkably chaste in the view of our class—and remarkably unchaste in the privacy of an apartment where your legal guardian was often out all night on another bender.

Hikari, having watched the exchange giggled. "He's getting good at that, isn't he?"

"Fuck," Kensuke said, murdering the mood as his otaku's timing and vocabulary tended to do. For a moment I thought he'd lost a particularly good shot or the battery had gone… but no, the lens was turned dutifully ahead, staring down the front of our procession, suddenly parted and our very own Pied Piper, on… his knees?

The sounds of an old man weeping filled the silence that had swept over the procession. Hikari took a step forward but Touji held her in place. Shook his head just once.

The man had prostrated himself before a length of great black stone, a wall erected of a few grim blocks of obsidian marble. Stretching the length of our class's thirty odd students, a list of names held stoic, glittering faintly. The top of the plaque had only one line. Kamikaze. Somewhere above them a crow cawed harshly.

"Oniisan," the old man cried between sobs, reaching for the stone. No one moved.

* * *

It's weird, trying to post something coherent with a time limit on yourself. I truthfully have no idea what to make of this, only the slightest idea of where it might be going, and the dreadful premonition that it is too small for consumption. That said, I hope you found something enjoyable in it and don't worry or feel too bad for old Fushiki-san, there will be more to come and tug at heartstrings with later. The title shouldn't make sense yet, even if you know German. I'd say this thing will be done in two more chapters unless something really unexpected happens. 


	2. Artillery and Maneuvers

**A/N:** Part Deux with drinking swearing and violence oh my. Like all my stories, please bear in mind I don't endorse any of these and enter at your own risk.

* * *

**Arbeit Macht Frei**

**-**

**Artillery and Maneuvers**

We paired up with JSDF cadets, fresh on leave from a UN-sponsored tour fighting rebels and curbing ethnic cleansings in Myanmar, out for a night on the town via the Yokohama Naval Base and full of all the good humor a stint of freedom provides. They were hardly two years our senior, friendly, and with plenty of odd stories to share from various shore leaves. Tales of whores and hermaphrodites in Thailand, pirates in the South China Seas ("you should've seen those fuckers scramble when we lit them up with the fifty-cal!") and relative silence about Myanmar itself.

I'd heard somewhere on the news the fighting was heavy, ugly, and cold.

It was an odd change of mood from the somber attitudes of earlier in the day, when Fushiki had surprised us all. He apologized later after the temple, explaining that the plaque was an unexpected addition spurred by a newfound acceptance of militarism with the JSDF once again engaged and fighting overseas, lapping up morsels from a UN Military Budget of proportions that left contractors from Los Alamos to Kamchatka salivating at its scale. Finally, the kamikazes of World War II could be honored openly, and the dedication had taken the old man by surprise. He said nothing of his brother.

Settling down in a respectable Mexican restaurant which translated roughly to "Kiss My Ass" in a more mundane neighborhood of Shinjuku, the festivities had begun as a slow deluge on the start of a round of Tequila shots and Hikari's burning cheeks and coughing fit post-kampai. Not to be caught dead breaking the rules (the law really) in sight of class, the four of us had convinced her to cut loose with some conniving and simultaneous bridling of Touji's enthusiasm for a "loosened up" Hikari.

If some drink to remember, we were all drinking to forget our teacher's embarrassing outburst and subsequent shaming of the rest of the class who had entered into "the experiment" with expectations of an exciting vacation, fun-filled and fact-free by turns, hopefully just un-educational enough to render us free from academic burdens looming at home—or in my case, under the recent and unusual scrutiny with which Misato had begun studying our quarterly report cards.

I found my head dipping towards Asuka's bare shoulder by the second Tequila and thoroughly giddy by the first half of our newly arrived Coronas. The soldiers, looking far too sober, ordered two more shots and Asuka, unable to let her German pride be damaged, least of all by the male species, matched them. Her resolute posture bore no look of effort as we watched then clapped with the consecutive shots. She smiled wanly at me and, perhaps, just a tad seductively as well.

Kensuke was busy making bug-eyes at the two grunts as they described some of the more esoteric military hardware actually in use at the field, bringing up his pad now and again to scribble obscure acronyms and loadouts. Touji meanwhile eyed Hikari's breasts with a thirty-second regularity that was alarming in its atomic clock accuracy as she rubbed at her head, complaining of dizziness and an inability to feel her feet. The cadets laughed at this and encouraged her on the nearly untouched Corona standing next to her equally untouched enchiladas.

"Well here's the thing, Aida" Aji was explaining, voice suddenly raised above the din of a Tokyo supper. "Intel says ROE goes like this: when there's more than fifteen Burmese men meeting together in the open, you kill them. That's the orders. So we shell 'em."

A clatter of cutlery and suddenly slacked tethers of mozzarella filaments clinging to forks cradling uneaten portions as we turned to look at them.

My brain refused to compute the sentence, Touji paused in mid-chew as we all fixed ourselves on the two of them.

"That's right," Taka continued. "No questions asked. We just shell 'em." He brushed daintily at invisible dust or entrails of murdered peasants from a polished brass Chrysanthemum on the shoulder of the navy-and-gray uniform.

"Excuse me." Hikari shot out of her seat and stumbled towards the bathroom.

I felt a seething jealousy that I couldn't also lay claim to too much drink as an excuse to release my own imminent retching and instead stared into my chimichangas. Asuka, having the good fortune to be female, was able to excuse herself and trot after a wobbling Hikari while Touji, Kensuke, and I did our best not to meet the haunted, thousand-yard stares looming at the end of the end of the table.

As I straightened my collar I watched my chimichangas transform; beans became upended soil at the base of the Himalayas, salsa turned to blood of unsuspecting Nomads under cheese intestines and brain, shattered bone of dough bread where I'd hacked into a few bites with my fork. Bile tickled the back of my throat. It was a wedding I'd decided, the bride and groom lost somewhere in a cacophony of guacamole shredded shrubbery. The garnish, a little flower girl tipped on her side, thrown with the momentum of the missile she lay at the edge of the procession now, her bouquet cast to the ground along with her innocence. The chapel just a swirl of sour cream now.

I thought of Ryogoku and the photographs post-Tokyo Fire Bombing. Families tangled as bits of limbs, twisted as the fused beams of girders puddled around them. Pictures of children burned so black their faces just flakey cubisms, some modern art gone horribly awry between blistered infantile limbs.

"Just shell 'em" Aji repeated absently, voice gone hollow and soft.

* * *

We lost ourselves somewhere in the lights and sound of Shibuya. Touji and Kensuke had escorted a stumbling-drunk Hikari back to the dorms after a curt goodbye to our JSDF not-so-friends. And in my inebriated foolishness I chose to believe Asuka would actually make good on the promise to take the last train back to the dorms. Now it was two AM and I was kneedeep in Rum and Cokes, bumping and grinding to rainbow lasers, pumping strobe lights, and stuttering baselines of a DJ who had the whole club at the finger tips of delicate European hands, dancing on twin turntables in circular waltzes.

I was lost in the flutter of red doves swirling round my head and the flash of white smile when the lights caught her face, blissed, bouncing, laughing.

The next song started. A voice exploded from four darkened corners, echo and beauty. People began to scream. We'd landed in a hit, I thought.

"We've landed a hit," came a calculated voice behind radio static, reporting to his senior officers on a decimated market square, no longer hawking Buddhist prayer beads and other magics to ward against the "invaders."

"Hold your colors," the singer moaned while the ground steamed from spilled flesh meeting icy air. I stumbled a bit.

The snare drum caught and the club turned nova, spinning swirling with new rhythm and tempo to flashes of colors and the roar of sound. Asuka took my hands and we flew through a daze purple-green-red luminescence, ice skaters sliding on invisible shadowed ice as the room pulsed to bodies matching beats and lights of red and gold spinning in time. I watched the lasers draw firing squad executions by tribunals and mother's raped before children's wide eyes. Around me danced oblivious Tokyo privilege.

I dashed out as the song came to a close, panting and sweating in a brisk Tokyo night. Asuka bounded after me, bringing a nervous frown with her.

"Sick?" she said, rubbing at one of my shoulders and bending down just a little bit to look up into my eyes.

"I need to sleep somewhere," I explained, drawing back a curtain of her frizzed hair to see her grin faintly at the suggestion.

"Can't get back to the dorms now. Curfew's way past." She wrapped a hand around the small of my back and pulled me closer, letting breasts brush against a bicep. "Know any good hotels?"

"Well there are love hotels in this part of…" I trailed off, realizing I'd landed in her trap.

"Indeed? Well then." As if it was settled.

We walked hand in hand, eventually discovering _The Michaelangelo_. The reception was an automated kiosk which was an odd experience. There was not a soul inside as helpful arrow indicators kindly guided us to our room.

She snapped into the shower before I could inquire just what situation I'd gotten myself into. I sat on the white futon and casually flicked on the television. A girl in highschool uniform was taking a shower in something like a locker room, busy rubbing soap across her shirt and how exactly effective would that be at cleaning oneself anyway, not particularly probably, not that I'd imagine anyways, and the shower, the _real shower _under which the real and _not clothed_ Asuka Souryu was, turned off. I killed the TV and hid the remote behind a flower vase full of plastic posies.

She popped out, clad in a terrycloth robe and gestured wordlessly for me to do the same. I sat and scrubbed under the faucet, washing the night's sweat, pheromones, Tokyo air, bums, flowers, garbage, subways, jokes, urine, triumphs, car exhaust, losses, reliefs, leering stares, faulty sobrieties, expensive cocktails, gleaming neon, cheap fantasies, daydreams, nightmares, chill, humidity, easy promises, reverses of fortunes, lost loves, found ones. I could not quite wipe clean uncertainty so I toweled myself and exited in boxers still layered with spent effort of shaken hips and pent-up sexual frustration.

She smiled at me from under the covers and beckoned where she'd turned down the sheets for me. The lights were extinguished.

She turned on her side to lay one careful arm across my chest when my head touched pillow. She smelled like shower and danger and desire and _soft_. I felt the plush of her bra press into my shoulder as her bosom held against me and a sudden comfort that she wasn't naked after all. She pressed her lips against my cheek.

"I'm not ready," she whispered.

"Neither am I," I replied.

It was strangely wonderful.

I dreamt that night. We were flying in a Zero, Asuka perched in my lap and maneuvering the stick. There were no bombs in its belly, no guns in its nose. She giggled as we glided between clouds over a boundless Pacific. I saw Fushiki's brother, young, handsome, at our wingtip in his own fighter, smiling at us behind a headband that read: "we've landed in a hit." He gave his thumbs up, and veered away, a flock of white gulls following him. He disappeared over the horizon—never crashed.

* * *

Well, I'm in Cambridge, England now and settled down for an afternoon to continue this. If the parts keep staying this short I may have a few more to go, I suppose it depends on where the story takes me. Thanks for the reviews, more are always appreciated. :P 


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